Driving the Indians Westward: Indian Removal to 1840

For more than three hundred years, white men battled Native Americans for control of the North American continent. From the early seventeenth century, when European settlers landed on the shores of the present-day United States, to nearly the dawn of the twentieth century, white settlers and soldiers waged an unrelenting war to claim the lands that Native Americans, or Indians, had long known as their own. The three-and-a-half-century war between whites and Indians consisted of battles large and small; of organized campaigns by the U.S. Army and daring daylight raids by Indian warriors; of extreme brutality and rare kindness. Though the underlying cause of the wars was the hunger of white settlers and governments for land, the tensions were heightened by the huge cultural differences that separated the two peoples. Whites and Indians thought very...